Recently, according to development and diversification of medical image diagnosis apparatuses such as a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) equipment and a Computed Tomography (CT) equipment, a data amount of medical tomographic images that were outputted, for one patient, by the MRI equipment or CT scanning equipment remarkably increases. Therefore, a burden of a doctor who extracts effective information from huge data and performs treatment, diagnosis and operation is also a problem.
Then, in order to reduce the burden of the doctor, attention is paid to various computer diagnosis support technique. As one element of the computer diagnosis support technique, there is position presumption of organs within the medical images. By automatically presuming the position of the organ whose appearance changes depending on the photographing principle of the MRI or CT scanning equipment and/or a photographing protocol concerning identification of a photographing target to which attention is to be paid within the organ, it becomes possible to perform presumption of the posture or interpolation of a missing portion, which is other than an organ cross section that is a scanning target within the MRI image or CT scanning image, such as an artifact that is a noise, which occurs based on the photographing principle of the MRI equipment or CT scanning equipment.
When extracting an organ shape from a medical image, it becomes possible to stably perform organ extraction by initially presuming a region of an organ to be extracted. However, when the photographed region of the medical image is insufficient and a portion of the organ to be extracted is not photographed, the position of the organ may not be identified with high accuracy. Moreover, there are organs whose position or the like cannot be easily identified from the MRI image or the like.    Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2004-508856    Patent Document 2: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2007-209583    Patent Document 3: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 08-287228    Non-Patent Document 1: Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Marc Levoy, “Efficient Variants of the ICP Algorithm”, Proceedings of International Conference on 3-D Digital Imaging and Modeling, pp. 145-152, 2001